


Ensnared

by ancestrallizard



Category: Digital Devil Story, Shin Megami Tensei Series
Genre: Gen, Some bloodless violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-01
Updated: 2017-10-01
Packaged: 2019-01-07 20:08:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12239790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancestrallizard/pseuds/ancestrallizard
Summary: Yumiko reminisces.





	Ensnared

**Author's Note:**

> Written in a day on Sept 11 for the game's anniversary

Yumiko ate candy on her bed and stared at the beams of light that leaked from the shuttered blinds onto the ceiling. It was sickly sweet, crunched in a way that meant it was probably stale, and burned her tongue raw. When the bag was empty it would join the other ones that covered the floor. She kept sugary and salty junk food in a cache in her room for emergencies, like if she got hungry at night, or if she didn’t want to eat dinner with her parents. She had not planned on the supply lasting her days of hiding out in her room because she didn’t know how to tell her mother and father about what happened.

The stereo in the corner played a tinny pop song from a CD she’d found on sale years ago and picked out on a whim. It was terrible, but, low on options, she’d played it three times beginning to end already. It was just one of many CDs and cassettes she’d played nonstop since returning from the hospital. In the day to cover the sounds of the city and their neighbors, and at night because there wasn’t anything to listen to then. Yumiko scraped the last of the salt from the bottom of the bag and wondered, in an observational, detached way, who would break first, her or her parents. Footsteps had paced down the hall and stopped by her door, sometimes for minutes at a time. Once or twice they knocked, or said something, but she never replied. They were acting how they normally did when she was upset with something, leaving her alone to work her anger out herself or to come to them when she was ready.

But she wasn’t angry. Or sad. She wasn’t anything.

And she wouldn’t break first. She could tell her parents were both boiling over with questions ever before they voiced them, why did she turn up with a classmate hundreds of miles from school, why did she wake up screaming in the hospital, why did she flinch whenever they or the nurses tried to touch her, and there was no way to answer them without sounding out of her mind.

So the sensible thing to do was stay in her stifling box of a room and only come out to use the bathroom in the middle of the night like some kind of wraith.

The bag of chips was well and truly empty. Yumiko let it drift to the floor to join the other crumpled plastic wrappings and wiped her greasy hands on her pajama pants. She groped around the floor on the off chance that there was an unopened bag of snacks she might have missed. Book, crumbs, empty wrapper, more crumbs…

Her fingertips stopped on an unfamiliar object, small and oblong. Yumiko picked it up and squinted at it in the weak light. It was a pen, black and expensive looking and definitely not one of hers. Where did it come from?

The memory hit her like a train. Her pen had stopped working in the middle of class, so she asked the girl who sat next to her if she could borrow one of hers. The girl’s gaze was unfocused and her movements were sluggish, something Yumiko had chalked up to exhaustion at the time, but she’d given her the pen. She wore the same rigid and vacant stare in the computer lab when the bubbling slime that was Loki engulfed her and twisted and wrung her body like a dishtowel. The snap of her bones was muffled by the pulsing organic mass, like sticks breaking in mud. She didn’t even try to resist. None of them had.

Yumiko’s legs were unsteady from lack of use – she almost tripped twice in her hurdle to the bathroom.

She flushed away the sick when her stomach stopped convulsing and rinsed her mouth out in the sink. Days of empty food and now this created an ache that spread through her entire torso like a bruise. She limped past her room into the empty, cold kitchen. Dishes were drying under the open window. Her parents were at work, though judging by the time her mother would be returning soon, and her father a few hours after her. Yumiko conceded defeat with a cup of tea she forgot to drink once it was made, and waited at the dining room table for them to come home.

**Author's Note:**

> Yumiko went through a lot of shit in the first book 
> 
> If you like smt and memes feel free to check out my tumblr, I usually post writing there before ao3: ancestrallizard.tumblr.com


End file.
